Google Analystics

Tuesday, 16 September 2014

Most of us have heard friends, acquaintances or people more remote from us tell horror stories about some or other events that have taken place in a long-term care home, or read something in the newspapers.

Someone I was speaking to recently was shocked to see how much disrespect was shown by family members of a home resident toward the personal support worker who was attending to their loved one in the home.

CUPE Ontario published this video on YouTube two weeks ago. It is a powerful statement providing a window from the point of view of nurses and personal support workers.

Wednesday, 10 September 2014

The
Summer 2014 issue of Qmentum Quarterly put out by Accreditation Canada has a
very interesting article on ethics in healthcare by Robert Butcher titled,
"Supporting Ethical Practice in Your Community".

The
article starts with the following posers:

A
homecare nurse calls you with concernsabout a
client who has been discharged fromthe
hospital. She has questions about his homeenvironment
and his ability to look after himself.“The
place is squalid,” she says. “He is unsteadyand
forgetful, but adamant that he wants to beat home.
I’m worried.”During
flu season your staff’s vaccination rateis at 70%
and the local public health officer hasdeclared
an outbreak in the community. Shouldyou
require unvaccinated staff to get vaccinated,take
Tamiflu, or stay home?The
Executive Director of your hospital’sfoundation
has just called. They have received avery
generous offer from a local businesspersonto fund
and name a new wing. He is involvedin a
bitter dispute in the community over thedevelopment
of large tracts of good agriculturalland. The
donation is a clear attempt to courtpublic
favour; to use your good name andreputation
to enhance his.

What
should you do in any of these cases?
Better
yet, what should your organization do?

The article goes on to lay out how an organization can develop an ethics framework within which ethical decisions can be made.

Friday, 5 September 2014

In a
professional on-line discussion group in LinkedIn that I follow, somebody posed
the following question. How
would you package the edict, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" to
your employees and colleagues so that everyone buys into it and nobody becomes
offended?

The way I
see it, this is about organizational culture,
the way we do things, our principles and values and how these align for
individuals, as a team and as an organization.

I do not
have military exposure other than reading books, watching movies and talking
with friends who were in the military but, clearly, whether soldiers 'shoot
their own wounded' or 'leave no on behind', they don't think about that
decision for the first time when they are confronted with the situation. It's
in the training and in the culture and, long before, they know how they are
going to act even if they hope the situation never arises. If a leader has to
say, "Lead, follow or duck" in
a crisis then that is way too late and will probably precipitate a crisis of
its own.

I believe
it was Peter Drucker who said, "Culture
eats strategy for breakfast." If your organization's new strategy
is being torpedoed by the prevailing culture that has evolved over years, I
would recommend introducing a culture shift with a broader, proactive
initiative such as implementing a decision to become a Lean organization (very
different to lean and mean) that can hold out opportunities for growth for all.
It may appear to be slower to implement and you may need help and training, but
without a culture shift your new strategy is going to have a long, uphill battle.

An
essential element of the strategy for introducing a new strategy is to consider
the people: the team and the individuals. As I read recently, they are not the
most important asset of your organization, they ARE the organization.